


Malice's Seed

by Esteliel



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Casefic (sort of), First Time, Javert Fighting Evil, Javert Lives, Javert Turns Into a Tree, Javert saves Valjean, M/M, Metamorphosis, Other, Paris Era, Rue Plumet Garden, Supernatural Elements, Tentacle Sex, Valjean Saves Javert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:07:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29266977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esteliel/pseuds/Esteliel
Summary: A purpose had awoken in Javert. The old instincts of the hunter came bursting into being with full force, burning away the chill that wanted to creep into his veins. Baring his teeth, Javert strode forward into the garden, following the creaking and groaning into the darkness before him, his path lit only by dim moonlight.He knew where the sounds had led him even before the moonlight suddenly gained in intensity, cold light illuminating branches that stretched out for him with terrible voracity.
Relationships: Javert/Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean/Evil Tree
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20
Collections: Valvert Monster Remix





	Malice's Seed

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Before a Silver Dawn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28576734) by [TwelveLeagues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwelveLeagues/pseuds/TwelveLeagues). 



It was several months after a washerwoman had dragged him half-dead from the waters of the Seine near the Pont-Neuf that Javert found himself seated in the commissaire’s office in No. 14, Rue de Pontoise once more, dealing with all sorts of petty reports while the commissaire was unavailable.

After having his resignation dismissed by God in turn, Javert had found himself walking the well-trodden path of his life once more, now with the bewilderment of someone who found himself retracing his steps in a dream where familiar rooms and items all seemed vaguely wrong.

And yet, it seemed that his superiors did not share Javert’s unease.

Most of the prefecture believed that some thief had attempted to rob him and then pushed him into the Seine. His patron, who knew what had befallen him, had brushed Javert’s halting explanations aside and intervened for his sake with the prefect’s secretary, who had held back the strange letter that had ended on the prefect’s desk. That task done, Chabouillet thought the matter solved and would hear no more of it, expecting Javert to return to the habits of a lifetime. Likewise Javert, who had spent too many days staring at blank walls during his convalescence, was glad to have a routine to devote himself to, although every step he took and every word he spoke seemed hollow, as if he was merely a puppet dancing on someone else’s strings.

Yet even the mechanical act of hearing complaints, writing reports and walking the streets to the prefecture and back were a better thing than staring at a wall, trapped with nothing but the thoughts in his head. Here, in these familiar surroundings, it was easy not to think, his hands and his mind guided by mere routine.

All of that ceased the day a young woman entered his office.

She was very beautiful, dressed tastefully in silk and damask. She came on her own, which surprised Javert, but he was too numb to do more than sit and watch her talk while his hand took notes.

Her address was a house in the Marais, a good neighborhood. Her speech and manners confirmed Javert’s first impression of her—a well-educated woman of means, recently married, who had come to ask for help concerning the sudden disappearance of her father.

“Did he live with you, madame?” Javert asked without looking up, his pen at the ready.

He had half written down the address she gave him before he stopped, looking at the words before him.

Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7.

There was a sudden rush of blood in his ears as he remembered that moment—the smell of gunpowder, the sound of shots nearby, the knife in Valjean’s hand, and the promise he had made.

_I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7._

Abruptly, Javert stood so that the woman looked at him in shock. Javert found himself studying her face, casting for the memory of another woman who had once desperately grasped his hand and kissed his coat as she pleaded with him—a woman who had died right in front of his eyes.

Could it be...?

“Is there anything else of note that happened? Anything out of the ordinary you recall?”

“Before he vanished, he asked me to call him Monsieur Jean,” she said quietly. “Perhaps I should have known that something was wrong. He was the best father I can imagine, Inspector. A good man, known for his philanthropy. He doesn’t like attention—I never would have come to you, only my husband refuses to help me search for him—”

“Perhaps your father simply went on a journey,” Javert said, thinking back to that day he last saw Valjean. Had something happened to him? He had driven Valjean back to his home—the Rue de l’Homme Armé.

The woman hesitated for a long moment.

“I don’t think he would have left without even so much as sending me a note, Inspector,” she said at last. “And as I told you, he was known for his philanthropy. Someone might have attacked him.”

“A robbery?” Javert followed the well-worn tracks of an interview he had conducted a thousand times while his mind lingered, shocked, on the face of the man who had shared his carriage. “Did you find signs of violence in his home?”

Here the woman hesitated again. “I did not think to look, Inspector,” she said uncertainly. “Surely I would have noticed a broken window? But when I tried to call on him, I only noticed that he was not home, and that there was no note or letter left, and the portress did not know of anything...”

“One must investigate the home,” Javert muttered absentmindedly through his teeth as he made notes. “Very well. Anything else?”

“Ah—there is another address,” she said. “I called there too and looked inside, but no one was there—and of course, he no longer has Toussaint to look after the house for him—”

“Address?” Javert demanded.

“Rue Plumet,” she said, and then rose and came a step forward. “You must find him, Inspector. My husband wants to hear none of this, but I have been having such dreams... Dreams of a dark forest, of dark trees...”

She shivered, then cut herself off and forced a smile back onto her face. “You will think this all very silly, monsieur, but I tell you, I know him very well. Something is amiss here. I cannot help but worry.”

Javert closed his notebook. “I will look into the matter myself,” he said, surprising himself. “Right away.”

***

After many weeks of hovering in offices like a ghost, writing reports with a hand that did not seem his own and listening to complaints of tailors, clerks and mistresses with the same bemused detachment with which he would have listened to the complaints of cats and tigers had they walked into the commissaire’s office on their hind legs to register their grievances, Javert now found himself walking with fresh purpose through the streets of Paris.

His first visit was to the Rue de l’Homme Armé. Javert recognized the house. Here he had stopped and let Valjean leave the carriage; there Javert had sat, watching him enter the house; there Javert had ordered the coachman to drive him away—away from Jean Valjean; away from a criminal he could not arrest; away, in the end, from what had once been his life.

Javert might still be alive now as he returned to his old life again, but whatever he had lost that night, he had not found it again. This mission that had sent him driving through Paris once more was in fact the first time in months that he had had a taste of that old resolution, and though it felt strange on his shoulders, like an old coat he had outgrown, there was a comfort in the familiarity of wearing it once more.

The portress had little to tell him that Javert did not already know—except for the fact that she thought the match Valjean’s daughter had made was a bad one.

“Never came to visit,” she said, shaking her head as she led him up the stairs. “And her such a good, pious girl before. He never complained but you could see it broke his heart. Stopped talking, stopped eating. Then he moved out—but the rent is still paid. Everything is as he left it. We didn’t touch anything.”

Javert spent half an hour going through the small apartment.

One room, which must have been that of Cosette, the woman who had come to him, was empty. Valjean’s bedroom, on the other hand, did not look like that of a man who had gone on a journey. Likewise, it showed no sign of violence or theft. It looked like the room of a man who had gone out for a walk, planning to return within the hour.

Having gleaned all that he could, Javert then made his way across the river to the Rue Plumet address he had been given. The situation he found was notably different to that of the small apartment of Rue de l’Homme Armé, which had been the sort of lodging an impoverished, retired scholar might choose.

The Rue Plumet house meanwhile possessed a gate surrounding a garden that looked as if it had not been tended to for years. Through the gate and the garden, Javert could see a house—a pavilion, shutters closed despite the fact that it was only noon. It did not appear as if anyone had lived here in years, although he had Cosette’s word that she had lived in this pavilion with her father until a year ago.

After her visit, Javert had sent a man to make inquiries, and was told that the man who had rented the house for the past few years rented it still.

As Javert stood observing the gate thoughtfully, a man walking past with a crate of vegetables stopped with a curious look at him.

“Something the matter with that house?” he asked. He looked Javert up and down dubiously, then came to the obvious conclusion that he was not talking to a man who could afford to rent a house such as this.

“I’m an inspector of police,” Javert said and gave him a grim smile. “What do you know about the house?”

“Oh, nothing,” the man said. “That’s why I’m curious. We all are. Everyone knows it’s haunted. There are tales... A man used to keep his mistress there, many years ago. One day she vanished. And when the man came to pay a visit to her next, why, he never left that garden again. The cook says she heard terrible sounds that night—the creaking of branches as if there was a storm, though there was no wind, and a howling that didn’t sound human.”

Javert scoffed. “Dogs howl. I’m more interested in what might have happened here during the past few months. Have you seen anyone? Is anyone living there?”

“Why do you want to know?” The man gave him a suspicious look. “And I wouldn’t know, would I? I saw the mistress of that house sometimes when she walked in the garden. Haven’t seen her for a year now. They had a servant who talked a little when we went out to the shops. Said the queer gentleman she worked for was a saint. He must have been a saint, to live in that dreadful garden and not die from fear.”

A servant, Javert noted. He would have to return and ask Cosette where she could be found—she might know more about Valjean’s habits.

“Apart from your howling demons,” Javert said, “you haven’t taken notice of anything else out of the ordinary? Strangers loitering about, watching that house? Making inquiries about the gentleman who lived there?”

“Such as you?” The man grinned. “No. But there was a night a few weeks ago when there was no moon out, and I woke from a terrible dream. You can think of me what you will, but I swear to you I was taken with such a fright that I rose and went to the window. There was a darkness hovering over that garden, and it filled me with such terror that I crossed myself and went through the house to make sure all the windows and doors were locked. Master’s watchdog was howling, too—wouldn’t shut up even when we gave him a bone.”

This time, Javert did not fully succeed in keeping back the laugh that wanted to escape. “Very well, nothing happened to this house apart from your demons. Fortunately, I do not fear those.”

“You’d do better to stay away from that house,” the man said, “mark my words.”

Javert took a note of the house the man entered, who appeared to be one of the servants of Rue Plumet No. 16. Then he inspected the gate once more before he began to walk along the fence, searching for any signs that might betray that someone had broken in.

He did not have to walk for long before he discovered a bar that appeared suspiciously smooth and devoid of much of the dust and dirt that stained the iron. The bar, he found, could be removed, upon which it was possible for a man to enter through the fence.

Without thinking, Javert stepped through.

There was a regiment in barracks at the end of the street, and perhaps he should have demanded two soldiers to come with him. Yet if a robbery had taken place here, it must have happened many weeks ago when Valjean had vanished. Javert doubted that there was any danger now—unless, of course, one believed in demonic forces haunting a garden.

Softly laughing to himself and invigorated with new resolve so that for the first time in many months, he no longer felt like a ghost of his former self, Javert strode through the garden. On a stone bench close to where he had entered he found a first clue. An address had been scratched into the wall, and he noted it down before he continued.

There was no answer when he knocked on the pavilion’s door. He wondered for a moment whether he had been right to come here—would not Valjean immediately run, should he see Javert?

But then, it was highly doubtful that Valjean still remained here, or else his daughter would surely have found him. Valjean might hide from Javert, but there was no reason to hide from his daughter. Unless—had Valjean feared that Javert might return for him?

But if he had felt threatened, surely Valjean would have taken his daughter and ran with her, as he had done before. And yet, she was a married woman now, and given the way she had been dressed when she had come to see him, Javert doubted that her husband knew anything about Valjean’s past.

Slowly, Javert walked around the pavilion, wondering if he might find an open window. All the shutters were closed. Perhaps, rather than wait and see if Cosette might produce a key, he could find a different way inside...

Still focused on the pavilion before him, Javert nearly missed the fact that he had walked all the way around to the back of the small house. There was another door there that was locked—but most importantly, he saw when he raised his head, there was another building he could glimpse at the end of the property.

If he had thought the garden in front of the house neglected, the garden behind it was a veritable wilderness.

Here and there, statues rose, covered with vines and ivy. The trees had lost their leaves, their branches bare. Javert felt a sudden chill, goosebumps rising on his skin as a cold breeze seemed to worm its way beneath his clothes.

He bared his teeth. “Am I such a fool to believe in superstitious nonsense?”

There might have been a kernel of truth in what that man had told him, but Javert doubted that it involved demonic forces. Branches creaking and terrible howls—now there was a good sign that his intuition had been correct and a crime had been committed. Thieves had climbed a tree, perhaps, to reach the windows of the pavilion’s upper floor, and poisoned a watchdog, which died with howls of agony.

Javert drew his coat around himself, then strode off through the garden to explore the shack he had glimpsed.

There was a path that led through the garden that might once have been paved with stones. Now all that was visible was a hint of gray stone here and there, the path remaining a path only because the weeds and vines grew shorter along it.

Statues gazed at him with unseeing eyes as he made his way forward. Once or twice, he thought he saw movement from the corner of his eye, but whenever he turned around, there was nothing to be seen but overgrown statues and bare branches.

Javert frowned again, annoyed at himself for having been unsettled by one foolish servant. It was true that Javert had spent the past months locked up in an office doing the most tedious work, going through life as if he was trapped in a bad dream. Matters had felt strangely unfinished.

To wake after he had been pulled out of the river had not seemed a new beginning, but rather as if he had truly died, as if he was not meant to be where he was. The world had continued to move forward around him while he himself was still standing on that parapet to this day, the cut already made between him and God, but the letter containing his resignation still lingering on that Superior’s desk, unopened and awaiting an attention that did not come.

Now, for the first time, Javert felt as if he had woken from that dream. He could not say why or to what purpose, but he could feel the cold air and smell the scents of the garden; he knew that he was here, truly here, and not merely trapped in the skin of a man who had ceased to exist on that parapet.

He did not know why that should be so, but he had never been a man given to questioning the structures of his reality, and thus he merely strode forward towards the shack he had spied past the bare branches of a tree.

The tree looked ominous, he had to admit when he skirted around it. It was no wonder, perhaps, that rumors abounded among the surrounding houses. The tree’s bark was dark, nearly black, the branches lifted menacingly towards the heavens. The tree loomed above Javert like a mythical beast readying itself to strike.

But tree was all it was, frozen in this grotesque form due to a lightning strike. A gardener would have been inclined to tear the thing out, root and all, and plant new, green growth in its stead—but by the air of neglect that characterized the entire garden, Javert did not doubt that Valjean had never even considered such an act.

And indeed, perhaps it had suited Valjean well to rent a house people avoided. Here, in the pavilion behind the overgrowth, he had been able to lay low for several years.

The branches above creaked menacingly. Chance had made it so that knotholes were situated just where two eyes might be. There was a gash in the tree’s trunk as well, no doubt left by the same bolt of lightning, which a mind given to flights of fancy might interpret as a jagged mouth.

Javert merely sneered at this thought and turned away from the tree to continue on his way to the shack.

As he had expected, the small hut was abandoned as well, although someone had clearly been living in it. The door had not been locked, and so Javert entered, although there was not much to explore.

Two straw chairs, a folding-bed, a cold stove, and a white wood table already covered by a thin layer of dust. It was a humble abode—except, Javert saw to his sudden shock, for two candlesticks of silver dulled by weeks without a polish, adorning a small shelf that otherwise held only a few books and a copper crucifix.

Was this Jean Valjean’s home? It had to be. Yet why would he live in this shack and not in the pavilion after his daughter had moved out? Did he fear discovery? And if so, by whom? Javert had let him go that night of the barricades. Were there others in this city who knew of his past and had tried to blackmail him? Had he run into an ex-convict who recognized him?

And yet, had Valjean been kidnapped, then would the villains not have tried to blackmail his daughter, who clearly lived a comfortable life?

It was all very puzzling, and Javert could find no answer in the shack. Save for the layer of dust, it looked as if the man who inhabited it had merely risen from his table and gone outside for a short errand, expecting to be back within the hour. Had Valjean taken a walk in his garden when a band of criminals came upon him? That seemed most likely. Had Valjean run, he would not have left the candlesticks behind.

And yet, if he had been kidnapped, then why had those ruffians not searched his house and taken the silver?

Javert shook his head as he surveyed the shack. Something made no sense here.

***

A day later, Javert was back in the overgrown garden with a key. None of his leads had yielded anything. None of his informants had heard about a kidnapping, although there was one man who had heard about a planned robbery that had not gone through.

All the same, when Javert had questioned the other houses lining Rue Plumet, several of the servants told him that they had heard strange noises coming from the garden again last night—worse than before, they claimed, and this time sounding more like the sounds of a man in pain than a maddened dog.

Javert had once again searched the garden, going through both the house and the pavilion, but had found nothing. Nevertheless, he was determined to get to the bottom of the matter. Was it possible that there was a hidden basement in which villains had locked Valjean, torturing him at night in the hope that he would reveal hidden riches?

It was the only theory that made sense to Javert—that, or the revelation that the noises came from a dog or cat prowling the garden at night.

In either case, tonight Javert would have his answer.

Javert had settled in for the night hidden behind a thicket of roses in a corner of the wall that surrounded the garden. From his hiding place he had a good view in both the direction of the pavilion and the shack. He had two loaded pistols with him, and two soldiers from the nearby garrison waiting around the corner, ready to come to his assistance at the sound of a shot.

It was a long wait. The garden was quiet as night fell. Every now and then, there was movement, which without fail turned out to be owl or bat. Once, a cat came striding past Javert, nonchalant and elegant, so that Javert wondered whether he had found the source of the eerie noises that had spooked the neighbors.

Javert kept waiting. The garden remained quiet.

All of a sudden, there was movement. In the dim light cast by the street lamp behind the garden wall, he could see a spot of darkness coming racing out of the gloom that was the garden, accelerating past him to scale the wall with a single jump.

It was the cat that had walked past him earlier, looking terrified. Most importantly, it had not made a single sound despite its rapid flight.

Javert frowned. What had scared it so?

As he listened again, he could now hear the creaking of branches. The temperature seemed to have suddenly dropped. Javert shivered instinctively as an icy breeze touched his face with cold fingers—but there was nothing before him, just the darkness of the garden and the rose bushes.

Then he heard a sound.

It was a terrible sound, low and mournful. It was not the groans of a man being tortured; Toulon had made certain, even so many years later, that Javert was intimately aware of the sounds of torment. The sounds that filled the garden were of a different nature—or rather, the pain they gave voice to was not a physical pain.

Grief assailed Javert all of a sudden. There was a sharp, fiercely aching emptiness at the bottom of his heart, as if something or someone had sucked away all the warmth in his chest. 

Javert swayed, still kneeling behind the roses. Desperately, he swallowed to hold back the sound of horror that wanted to escape him. Then he forced his trembling fingers to tighten around his pistols and made himself rise.

Immediately the terror that had taken hold of him abated a little. He could still hear the chilling sounds that emanated from the center of the garden—he could hear little else, save for the roar of his blood in his ears—but he no longer felt the urge to hide away with his hands covering his ears.

A purpose had awoken in Javert. The old instincts of the hunter came bursting into being with full force, burning away the chill that wanted to creep into his veins. Baring his teeth, Javert strode forward into the garden, following the creaking and groaning into the darkness before him, his path lit only by dim moonlight.

He knew where the sounds had led him even before the moonlight suddenly gained in intensity, cold light illuminating branches that stretched out for him with terrible voracity.

Before him, the tree stood. Whereas in the light of day, it had seemed no more than any other tree rendered grotesque by a lightning strike, now it appeared to have gained a horrible sentience. It leered at Javert, dark branches reaching out towards him, whipping the air—and still he heard the sounds that had drawn him hither, a wordless groan of such misery and grief that it made Javert tremble to hear.

Javert drew his pistol and pointed it in front of him, although there seemed to be no use in it. Thieves Javert could handle, and the villainous bands of the Salpetrière did not frighten him. But this thing before him was a creature of pure menace. It stood before him like a wound in the world, as if an invisible blade had ripped the fabric of reality right in front of him. The monstrous tree that rose above him seemed less a physical being than the utter absence of all that was right and good, a chilling void where neither light nor hope could penetrate.

Javert gritted his teeth and aimed his gun. He had seen this creature before, if creature it was. It had stood with him that day on the parapet, embracing him with hands of soul-chilling coldness, and it had waited for him in the darkness below when he had jumped.

It had not been the dark waters of the Seine that had swallowed him, but this lightless absence of life. Only Javert had not remained in its embrace. By chance or providence, some poor washerwoman had fished his unconscious body out of the river when he had drifted against the side of her boat, and Javert had been dragged out of the maws of the darkness before him.

Was that why it was here? Had it come to reclaim its prey?

Javert laughed at the tree.

“You have no power over me,” he said. “I know you well. I live; that means I am not yours. Maybe one day I will be yours again, but for now I have purpose, and you have no right to be here. This garden is no place for you. Go back to the river; no doubt there will be other prey for you today.”

At his words, something in the atmosphere shifted. The tree appeared to grow even larger until its branches blocked out the sky, an otherworldly wind tearing at Javert’s hair and clothes.

The opening in the tree had grown in size with the tree. Where in the light of day it had merely seemed a wound left behind after lightning had struck, now it seemed a wound in the fabric of the world itself, a darkness even deeper than the darkness of night, a blackness so absolute that light itself was certain to die if it dared enter.

And from that wound of unearthly darkness, the sounds Javert had heard earlier once more came echoing. They were louder this time—nearly inhuman sounds of grief and torment, reverberating all around him as the branches whipped through the air.

It was then that Javert realized that he knew the voice producing the sounds.

 _Valjean_.

He had heard him make those sounds before, long ago. Deep groans of despair and agony as Javert supervised a whipping.

The sound he heard was different. A terrible grief echoed in it, but it was Valjean’s voice all the same. There was no doubt about it.

Clutching his pistols tightly, Javert threw himself forward without thinking, straight into the gaping maw of darkness that loomed in the tree’s trunk—and found himself stumbling to his knees in a strange twilight.

Walls spread all around him, forming a sort of cave. From the look of it, these walls were not made of stone but of dark, living wood. There was light coming from somewhere above—a distant gleam of stars, perhaps, and proof that wherever this place was, it was not Hell itself but of this world.

Yet Javert had no time for philosophy. Before him, he found the man who had released him at the barricade and whom he had hunted ruthlessly for so long. This was the very man whom he had been trying to find he could not say for which reason, save that Javert was still of the police and an inquiry had been made, and that for the first time since Javert had awoken coughing up dark river water, the inquiry had filled him with purpose.

Jean Valjean was naked, spread out before him in a grotesque arrangement so that Javert’s first thought was that he had been crucified. At second thought, he could see that it was no cross that held Valjean upright and that he had not been nailed to it. Instead, branches that seemed strangely alive wound around his wrists and ankles to hold him upright.

Valjean’s eyes were closed. His skin shone with sweat. As Javert watched, he groaned again, a shudder running through his body—and it was then that Javert could see movement between his thighs.

As if the tree wanted to show off its evil deeds, the coiling branches lifted Valjean and spread his legs, forcing Valjean to arch his back as he shuddered. Between his legs, more of the branches were at work, twisting around each other as they penetrated his body, smaller vines curling around Valjean’s cock.

He was erect, Javert saw with sudden shock. Valjean’s cock stiff and swollen, his balls heavy and tight beneath, all surrounded by the smaller vines that tightened around him in a horrifying caress, coiling seductively around his swollen cock while another vine teased at his hole, then pushed inside as well to stretch him even wider.

Wetness dripped from Valjean’s cock until another vine found the small opening and slithered inside, Valjean’s entire body shuddering.

Javert’s fingers cramped around his pistol, but now, for the first time in his life, he did not know what to do.

How could one fight such a foe?

Whatever this thing was that had taken hold of Valjean, neither pistols nor handcuffs would help Javert against it. Even if he were to to fire his pistols, what would his bullets aim for? This strange place he had entered seemed to be wholly of the tree’s making. Its darkness surrounded him, spreading above and below him. He might just as well have tried to shoot at the walls of a cave.

Valjean groaned again, his body convulsing in agonized pleasure, spread open and apart like a lurid offering. Worse—Javert could feel an answering throb in his veins as he watched the dark vines take possession of Valjean, a nightmarish image which still did not fail to have an effect on him.

His throat dry, Javert watched as Valjean writhed in the grasp of the tree. Valjean’s muscles gleamed with sweat as he shuddered and strained, but there was no escape for him. The tree had taken possession of him, and Valjean was utterly helpless in its grasp—and helpless against the vile creature’s caresses as well.

Javert kept watching as the agile vines slid in and out, Valjean’s cock swollen and dark with blood, until to Javert’s horror, he felt his own body stirring at the display before him.

It was then that he heard the creature’s voice, cold and sharp as the wind and creaking like old branches.

 _Leave_ , it told him. _This place is not for you._

“Release him,” Javert ordered instead. “This man isn’t yours to keep.”

Branches rustled far above, a sound not unlike laughter.

 _This man is no longer your prey_ , the tree said. _And unlike you, I do not ever release my prey._

Driven by sudden fury, Javert stepped closer. The strange vines twisted at his approach, curling more tightly around Valjean as if to show off the power they held, and Javert’s heart clenched painfully in his chest as Valjean’s lips parted for a sound that was half pain, half pleasure as his body arched once more.

So close, Javert could see the sweat that shone like dew on the hard muscles of his body—and the way Valjean shuddered every time the vines that penetrated him twisted, coiling around each other inside him.

Without thinking, Javert found himself reaching out for the small tendril that had curled around Valjean’s cock and penetrated the small slit. He tore it out, slickness dripping from the vine—and a heartbeat later, Valjean’s body convulsed, his release spurting against his chest.

Breathing heavily, Javert stood staring at him, unable to hear anything but the thunder of his racing heartbeat.

For a moment, Valjean’s eyes opened and they looked at each other—and then a storm seemed to break free, wind tearing at Javert, and the voice he had heard before spoke once more.

 _He will never be yours,_ it said. _Unless...._

Helplessly, Javert lifted his hand to shield his face. He struggled forward, but there was only darkness now where a moment ago, dim light had illuminated the display of Valjean’s suffering body.

“Unless?”

Javert tried to push past the wind tearing at him with icy fingers, but it was to no avail. When he finally managed to take a step forward, there was nothing but emptiness. The darkness had swallowed all life. Valjean was gone. Even the scarce light of the moon and the stars had vanished.

Wherever he stood now, Javert knew that it was no longer a garden near the Invalides. He was, perhaps, where he had gone before, in those long moments before his body was swallowed by the rapids of the Seine.

That darkness had spat him out once before. But would it release him this time?

 _There is a way you can have him_ , the voice whispered in his mind in the creaking of wood and the rustle of sharp leaves, in the _drip drip drip_ of blood and the soft tremor of roots burrowing deep underground. _All you have to do is reach out and take him. Do you dare?_

All of a sudden, he could feel once more that Valjean was nearby.

Javert was still trapped in impenetrable darkness, the blackness that was the utter absence of light. Even so, he could see Valjean before him like an imagine burned into his mind’s eye, consisting of the warmth of his skin, the heat of his breath, the vigor of a strong heart pumping blood through panicked veins as muscles strained against restraints. Moreover, there was a new, seductive awareness of the vulnerable places that could be made to open for him, a way to fully possess this man at last whom he had hunted for so long, who had caused Javert’s own fall—and who could still be his and only his so that Javert could feast on those moans and those tears forever.

Javert knew then what it was the tree was offering him. Horrified, Javert nearly flinched back—save that he did not know where _back_ was in this space out of time, and that the image of Valjean hanging before him in the darkness was the one thing left that was real.

If he left now, he knew that he would never see Valjean again. Javert might escape unscathed—he had escaped this darkness once before, except, he now realized, that he had carried a tendril of it within his heart ever since. Perhaps it was this tendril of darkness that had allowed him to see the tree for what it was and to enter the space behind the gaping opening.

What other man might venture here? If he left now, Valjean would be lost—but Javert could report to Cosette that he was unable to find a trace of her father and continue to live his own life. In time, he might find satisfaction again in his work. He was still useful, after all; he knew his superiors would be loath to lose him.

Javert had every reason to flinch away from the monstrous creature before him. Instead, his choice made, he stepped forward, the tendril of darkness within his heart throbbing.

Later, he was not able to describe what had happened to him. He might have likened it to a seed taking hold within him, spreading roots that stabbed through his heart, growing along his veins, spreading through him from within until the cold wind and the fetid air and the scent of rot and blind worms and soil soaked with blood became his eyes and his ears and his tongue.

All he remembered was agony and a voracious hunger, pale roots burrowing like worms in blood-soaked earth, sensation crashing over him from too many directions so that he felt like a vessel lost between Scylla and Charybdis, torn this way and that by the maelstrom of the violent senses of his own body.

Jean Valjean was close. Javert could feel him now, even through the fearsome metamorphosis of his being.

Valjean was warm. His skin was soft, his muscles hard. Sweat dripped from his body as he arched helplessly in the tree’s embrace, and Javert’s roots dug down greedily, awaiting the feast of blood and tears and semen just as the darkness surrounding them had already fed on Valjean’s grief and his agony.

The thing that had spoken to him before was still hovering. It no longer needed words to converse with him; it spoke now in malice, in hunger and greed, in the hollow starvation of the empty places beyond light.

The only sound Javert was aware of was the sound of Valjean’s breathing and the rapid rhythm of his heartbeat, the only scent Javert could smell the alluring heat of Valjean’s skin. Valjean was in his grasp, held up by his wrists. All Javert had to do was to take what was already his.

At the back of his mind, Javert could feel the presence of the dark emptiness, its hungry glee as it waited for events to play out as they must have countless times before.

Javert tightened his hold on Valjean’s limbs slightly, felt the heat of his skin and the promise of what could be his. Then Javert took a deep breath, leaves rustling and wood creaking, and flung Valjean away from him with all his might.

 _“Leave,”_ he said, although he could no longer say whether he was speaking in words.

It was then that the ancient malice descended upon him, and for a while they fought. Cold emptiness tore at Javert’s branches. Desolation and despair gnawed at his roots, agony raining down to slice through his leaves, sharp as hail.

But the metamorphosis was complete, the transformation done, and the thing Javert had become was too much a creature of the same fabric the malice was made of to be vanquished by it.

At last, the other retreated, and Javert found himself alone in darkness. Jean Valjean was gone. As Javert’s leaves breathed in relief, he realized slowly that the nothingness that had cloaked him had been torn asunder. He could sense life once more—fertile soil to nourish roots, rain to wash his leaves, wind to sing at night.

No moon was out, but he could feel starlight upon his bark and leaves. It shone like a blessing from a firmament that stretched far above him, reminding him that even in that distant void, there was light and life, and that, although he had surrendered to the creature’s deal, this tree was yet of this world.

Time moved strangely thereafter. Javert was aware of Valjean’s garden surrounding him, but he was aware of it in the way of trees. He heard the song of birds and the movement of worms in the soil; he drank rain and dew and sunlight and felt the sap within him respond.

He felt, too, the stirrings of that great hunger, the place of darkness that was the absence of all things. It still throbbed at the heart of him, a jagged wound in the fabric of time and space that bled malice into the world.

He felt his loneliness. He could still remember the sensation of Jean Valjean held in his grasp, and at times the other that lived in the darkness pulsing in his heart would murmur wordlessly of the warmth of skin and blood and the nourishment of tears, and his roots would shiver instinctively with hunger.

Yet Javert, who had starved all of his life, did not find it so hard to resist now. Even if he had succumbed to the hunger, there was no one to feast on. The garden was deserted, the house uninhabited.

Jean Valjean had fled. Javert was certain of it. By now, Valjean would have returned to his daughter, and Javert’s task was done.

There was a satisfaction in knowing that the final case brought to him had been resolved and that the man who had spared his life had now been spared in turn. All things had come to an end.

Javert would have been content to allow himself to fade away into roots, into leaves and flowers and the sap rising in branches, little by little diminishing as was the nature of all living things. And yet, there was still that gash at the heart of him, seeping darkness like pus. Javert dared not surrender his hold for fear that the creature he had become would turn into a mindless thing of hunger and greed once more, waiting for another curious man to stumble into his garden at night.

Later, Javert would learn that two weeks passed, but at the time, it might have been months or years before he first became aware of a change.

Someone had entered the garden.

Javert’s senses had woven themselves into the earth and the water, into soil and air, into the crawling of insects on his bark and the song of birds that instinctively knew to avoid perching on his branches. Through them, he felt a disturbance in the equilibrium of the garden he had deeply rooted himself into.

The gash within him had never closed, bleeding darkness at the heart of him. Yet there was nothing it could touch, and Javert had learned to ignore the pangs of hunger, for there was rain and dew and earth to feast on.

Now it woke once more, an emptiness becoming aware of itself as the presence of warmth and life trod upon soil this entity had long claimed as its own.

It had become difficult for Javert to focus his senses in the way of men, but after a while, he became aware enough to realize that it was night, that the moon was shining down upon him, that the garden was quiet—and that someone was moving through the garden.

Had a neighbor given in to curiosity or a thief scaled a wall, hoping for riches?

In another life, Javert would have been filled with fierce excitement at the thought of catching a ruffian in the act and clasping him in irons. Now, he was filled only by dismay.

He raised his branches in warning. Breathing in the cold night air and the moonlight, he exhaled menace that would settle like a smothering cloud around any intruder and fill their minds with fear and darkness, so that they would turn around and flee before they came even close to where Javert had taken root in the earth.

The wind carried the creaking of his branches, a sinister sound filled with an ominous threat. A wind sprang up that would not be felt outside the garden. Within its walls it would brush cold fingers against any intruder and whisper quiet words of death and rot into ears. With a loud flutter of wings, a flock of night birds sprang up and took flight, abandoning the garden just as startled rabbits and mice froze among the tall grasses before rushing towards the walls, an age-old instinct driving them to flee the thing of darkness that lived at the heart of the garden.

Secure in the knowledge that the garden was empty once more and any living soul had fled, Javert settled back into the quiet meditation of growing roots and shifting leaves, the moonlight cool and silver upon his bark, just as it had once gleamed upon the waters of the Seine.

It was then that he head the soft tread of footsteps on dew-touched grass and knew himself no longer alone.

Terror rushed through Javert, yet before he could use what powers remained at his command to repel the intruder, the gentle touch of a hand settled upon his bark, close to where an unhealing wound oozed another world’s darkness into the present.

A shock ran through Javert, rippling through his leaves like water disturbed by the throw of a pebble.

He had no tongue to speak with, no hands to reach out in warning. He could only watch with root and bark and wind-stirred leaf as the man came forward until he faced the gash within Javert’s trunk and then willingly entered it.

The man was Jean Valjean.

In the garden, it had been difficult to put memories and thoughts into the language Javert had thought long left behind. In this realm they now both found themselves in, the eerie void inside him that contained him in turn, Javert found himself awakening to once-familiar patterns of thought and speech, as if Valjean’s presence had roused him from a long slumber.

 _You should not be here,_ he said.

“How could I not be?” Valjean answered simply. “You should never have entered this garden. It’s my fault you are here.”

_Other men would call it justice._

“What is the justice of man?” Valjean said quietly. “I have tasted it in its bitterest form. I can take no satisfaction from it. It breeds only more bitterness.”

 _Then for what have you come?_ Javert demanded.

He knew now of the grief and anguish that had fertilized the soil and nourished the tree’s deep roots. In the air, he could taste the promise of sorrow, thick like dew in the morning. Instinct made his roots shiver in anticipation, and his branches stretched out eagerly.

All the same, Javert was his own master, as he had always been. Even with this thing he had become, he would not surrender to these needs, as he had not surrendered for all the years of his life.

“Do you have to ask?” Valjean said quietly, and then willingly came forward. “I came for you.”

Javert shivered, leaves rustling far away in a garden lit by the moon as Valjean reached out and rested his hand against his bark.

The heat of Valjean’s body flowed into Javert. His branches shifted as sap rose within him, his roots burying greedily. The void of lightless darkness Javert had held off for so long reared once more, a menace now intertwined with glee and a breathless anticipation, as if it had been merely biding its time, knowing all along that in the end, both of them would fall.

Then Valjean stepped even closer and stretched out his arms, offering himself up to the branches that had risen almost without Javert’s doing. A violent shiver ran through Javert, all of his earlier resolve coming undone.

Valjean’s heart was thudding. Through his veins, blood ran hot and fast. It was the first touch of a living being Javert had felt in what to him had appeared like many years.

It was a strange experience, almost as violent in the upheaval it wrought in him than the transformation that had stripped him of the senses that had guided him all of his life in exchange for the overwhelming awareness of leaf and root, of rain and wind and sun and soil.

Jean Valjean’s heart was throbbing against Javert’s cold, rough bark. Valjean’s breath brushed against his trunk, warmer and moister than the wind in spring.

Javert shivered again, aching as if root by root, he was torn from himself, wood straining and stretching as if something was budding. Then he felt skin, warm and soft, and the rapid beating of a pulse—and it was then he knew that it was too late.

He had held off the malice of the creature of darkness that lurked still. He had done what he could to protect Valjean—but he could not, in the end, protect Valjean from himself.

Helplessly, he reached out for Valjean, embracing him with branch and vine until his body trembled at the sensation of Valjean’s heat. Valjean was soft where Javert was rough, warm where he was cold, the first light that had penetrated the darkness in which Javert had found himself trapped.

A part of Javert still remembered what had happened before and knew that he had to fling Valjean away before it was too late. Instead, with Valjean stepping into his embrace and offering himself up to Javert’s grasp willingly, Javert found it impossible to resist the temptation to wind himself around Valjean’s wrists, to taste his pulse and drink his fill of the vitality of a beating heart.

Valjean’s clothes fell easily when his vines explored beneath them. Valjean’s strong body shivered in Javert’s embrace at the touch, arching breathlessly when the first vine brushed tentatively against his soft cock.

With the groan of stretching wood, Javert explored along Valjean’s shaft, a part of him that had already nearly forgotten what it was to be human waking suddenly as if from a long slumber.

The softness of skin and the hardness of muscle was irresistible, and when Javert curled a tendril in curiosity around Valjean’s soft cock, he was rewarded with a moan and the sensation of Valjean’s cock stirring shyly at his touch.

Javert tried to be gentle despite the voracity of the thing inside him, curling himself around Valjean’s cock until it throbbed hard and proud, wetness leaking from the tip like sap rising in spring. Valjean’s breath was hot as a summer breeze against his bark. Even with Valjean trembling in his embrace, caught in this shadow place of in-between, Javert suddenly found himself remembering blue skies and sunshine on his skin, the sweetness of cold water on his tongue, and air that carried the scents of faraway gardens.

When he began to investigate further, Valjean shivered. His body was as magnificent as Javert remembered, immense strength paired with the limberness of a man used to scaling walls and roofs. As Valjean strained in his embrace, Javert hungrily kept exploring, winding himself around hard biceps and flexing thighs, tightening around the straining, broad chest and at last delving between the taut buttocks where Valjean was sensitive and vulnerable.

Valjean gasped once more when a vine slid against the small opening, his shivering intensifying although he did not try to move away.

Curious, Javert rubbed himself against the tight muscle, and with the barest pressure he managed to slide inside.

Within, Valjean was hot and tight. Javert slithered in deeper as Valjean trembled around him. He could feel Valjean’s cock pulse in his grasp as Valjean’s back arched, sweat dripping down muscles that flexed against Javert’s grip. Javert slid in and out, explored Valjean in a way he had never explored another until Valjean’s rapid breathing changed to constant moans.

As Valjean’s body shook around him, Javert twisted and coiled inside him, delighting in the way he could coax forth gasps and moans. Then Javert grew bolder, reaching out with another vine. Valjean’s body yielded to that as well as he pressed inside with it, although Valjean gasped at the stretch, his body hot and tight. When Javert curled around himself inside him, Valjean’s moans grew more urgent.

For so long Javert had dreamed of having Valjean in his grasp—and now, at last, he possessed him as he had never before. Valjean was in his power, utterly at his mercy, his body exposed to Javert and possessed by him, inside and out. With the smallest motion he could make Valjean tremble and cause fluid to drip from his cock like dew in the morning.

How easy it would be to take and devour him now. At last he could sate the voracious appetite within him with sweat and blood and seed until the soil was drenched with it and his roots would feast as they had never feasted before...

Already Javert could feel darkness seeping from the tear within the fabric of the world. It gathered close in glee and with a voiceless whisper of greed, a cold void yearning to be filled by sensation and heat. How easy it would be, it said to him, to tighten his grasp on those helpless limbs, to rend and tear the body that had watered him with grief and fed him with sorrow until Javert’s roots had grown deep and strong in this soil.

Dimly, as if from far away, Javert could now hear a soft, rhythmic pulsing. Sap rose within him, his branches quivering, the sensation of something waiting to split his bark open and burst forth into buds making him creak with agonized anticipation...

And then Valjean convulsed around him, the soft heat of his body tightening helplessly around Javert. A shower of Valjean’s seed rained down upon Javert’s roots, and Javert slammed down upon the darkness at the heart of him that had dared to greedily reach out.

Javert’s roots drank deep of Valjean’s seed, his vines drinking of Valjean’s heat and his pleasure. Strength filled Javert. It came rushing through him with such force that he felt his bark crack open under the onslaught, and still he clung on tightly, grimly determined, wielding that warmth and that pleasure and that light like a sword against the darkness oozing from the wound at the heart of him.

When they met, Javert heard a deafening crack, like lightning striking a tree.

Then everything was silent.

Sensation returned only in little increments. The first thing Javert became aware of was pain—a strange burn, as if his roots had been pulled from the soil one by one.

Then he became aware of wind, rasping against nerves that felt too raw and exposed, and scent that nearly overwhelmed him in its intensity: crushed grass, wet soil, the fragrance of roses and honeysuckles, and warm, human sweat.

Javert breathed deeply. For the first time in a long time, he felt air fill his lungs. His chest was rising and falling as his heart pumped hot blood through his veins in a shaky rhythm that grew steadier with every beat reverberating through him.

When he opened his eyes, light came flooding in. For long minutes, he could only lie still in awed silence, allowing the silver light to wash over him. It streamed through him like clear, cold water, and when it had passed through him, the gaping darkness that had throbbed inside his heart for so long had been washed away.

All that remained now was Javert, the simple, human construct of him. He was a thing made of the fabric of this world, a body that belonged among the grass and the soil and the moonlight and all the creatures of a nighttime garden.

Javert took another deep breath. Then, for the first time since he had stepped through the gash in the tree, he felt the touch of a human hand.

When he turned his head, he saw that Valjean was lying next to him. Valjean was naked, and Javert realized suddenly that he was naked himself, and that he could feel cool grass against his skin together with the press of a warm body against his right side.

Javert could not think of what to say. It still seemed a strange thing merely to be alive, to no longer exist in that gloomy space where he had been trapped, halfway between the warmth of this world and the dark void from which the creature had oozed into this world.

“You came back,” was what Javert at last settled on.

His voice was rough, his throat aching. He felt as if he had to learn anew how to use hands and legs and voice and breath.

For so long he had been _tree_ , had breathed through leaves and drank through roots and listened through the vibrations of his trunk. Now he was once more the man he had been, and it felt like a miracle—even more so than waking after the dark waters of the Seine had swallowed him.

Then, the life to which he had returned had seemed like a weary dream, a world he observed but to which he did not entirely belong. Now he was wholly alive, his body tingling with everything that was human so that he felt newly born and like a wanderer returned home after a long time away all at once.

“How could I not?” Valjean asked quietly.

There was a flush on his cheeks. Javert remembered all of a sudden the warmth of Valjean’s skin and the way he had arched when Javert had possessed him, willingly giving himself over to Javert’s monstrous embrace and allowing Javert to explore him from within, to drink deeply from his pleasure and everything that made him human.

Javert looked at him, and after a long moment, Valjean met his gaze. He looked as stunned as Javert, as overwhelmed by everything that had happened, but he did not look away. Instead, he allowed Javert to look his fill until he began to remember what it was like to be human, to have a body and a voice, to breathe and touch.

When Javert finally, hesitantly reached out his hand, Valjean took hold of it with the same shyness. The press of finger against finger seemed all at once as intimate as when he had wound himself around Valjean’s limbs and filled the secret places of his body.

Together, they rested in the grass for a long time without speaking, content to breathe in the scent of roses and honeysuckles as the moon shone its silver light down on them.


End file.
